Slotting attacks -- Recharge or Damage?

When I see recommendations for slotting attacks, I often see people recommending 2 or 3 damage, but often not very much recharge. I can see some logic behind this... recharge lets you hit things more frequently and thus do more damage. Unfortunately, hitting things more frequently requires higher expenditures of end. Damage increases your damage output without increasing your end use.

I usually slot my heavy-hitting attacks with one or even two recharges, but I find myself huffing and puffing if I'm taking on more than 4 guys solo. And that's with Quick Recovery. Could I help my endurance problems by replacing some recharges with damages? Will that hurt or help my DPS?

Any thoughts?

In that case, you can replace one of the recharge with Endurance Reduction for the higher-end powers, and/or use IO sets to get a little bit of everything, plus the set bonuses.

Or constantly team with somebody that will give you SB regularly. haha j.k

Slotting for damage instead of recharge is more efficient on your endurance.. but its effect on your overall damage depends on what other powers you've chosen. If you're a blaster, there aren't many cases where you really need to slot something with recharge. You have so many different attacks that you'll almost never be waiting around for them to recharge.

If you're, say, a Tanker... you're going to need recharge to deal damage consistently.

As for slotting in a little End Reduction, I tend to put one in any power that costs 10 or more endurance. Helps quite a lot.

I think there are a lot of ways to slot things that many guides don't mention.

For example, may want to slot 3 damage, but are you also slotting for accuracy? If you're not able to hit something, you can't do damage and you're running out of endurance faster.

Some people may be getting all their recharge from IO set bonuses and not slotting individual recharge enhancements. They may be doing that with accuracy, as well. If you're looking at how someone else is slotting, make sure you take all the bonuses into account. If you slot the same way they do with SO/IO enhancements without bonuses, you aren't going to perform the same way they are with their bonuses. They may forget to mention these details either in guides or in help channels.

Slotting needs/preferences may change as you level up. On my low-level melee characters with lots of toggles, for example, I will slot loads of endurance reduction enhancements and few damage resist/defense enhancements. It won't matter how much resist/defense I have slotted in my toggle powers if I can't keep the toggles up. Once I get Stamina and/or other ways to manage my endurance, then I'll start replacing my endurance reductions for more resist/defense enhancements. If you're following someone's slotting recommendations for a level 50 character on your level 15, you may want to ask the person if he or she can remember how the character played at level 15 or what kinds of changes the person made from 15 to 50. My Dark/Dark Brute sucked before getting Stamina and SOs (No Inventions back then) and my slotting was entirely different at 15 or 20 than it is at 50. If I tried to use my level 50 slotting methods on a level 15 Brute of the same kind, I'd be very ineffective and very unhappy.

Short answer: slotting Acc, End Reduction and Damage in your attacks will all help with the "blue bar blues". In most cases, attacks are by far the biggest user of endurance, so you want to make sure they hit as often as possible and do as much damage as possible for as little cost as possible.

Longer answer: As a general rule, Damage is the attack characteristic that is most desirable to 'max out'. But once ED came along and made it prohibitively expensive to slot Damage past 95% enhancement (3 SOs), people started diversifying their attack slotting. For SOs, I consider standard slotting to be the following: 1 Accuracy, 1 Endurance Reduction, 1 Recharge, and 3 Damage. Of course, some swear by 2 Accuracies, skip the Recharge, or skimp on Damage on their lower-tier attacks, but it's a good template to start with, IMO.

With IOs, you can pack more Acc, Recharge, or End Reduction into your attacks, sometimes with fewer slots, or you can rely on global bonuses to replace slotting individual attacks. (Though I think most still slot *some* of each characteristic.) But in general, besides slotting Damage to the ED cap, I'd try to slot at least one SOs worth (33%) of the other three unless you've got significant global bonuses to replace individual attack slotting.

Hope that helps!

I personally slot for Accuracy first (note: when Beginner's Luck noticibly starts to fade out). If you can't land your attack, you've wasted your time (ie recharge), your endurance, and all your whoopdedoo damage became a fanciful wish. I'd usually add Damage next, but I keep in mind my performance. If I'm constantly sucking wind, then Endurance Reductions will be added at the next level up. Depending on how "high damage" the power inherently is, I may put in a couple of Recharges before the Damages because high damage usually mean very long recharge. But generally, Recharge is low priority for the regular attacks.

Just to throw my two cents in here, I find that accuracy and damage are plenty potent. It depends on the powers I take and what I want to achieve though. Remember that all the enhancements are percentages, and so if I get to where I can use an attack twice in the time it takes you to use it once, unless your one time does twice the damage of one of mine, my damage-per-second count would be higher.

Also, more recharge prevents the chance of using a long recharge power on a mob that dies before it hits and then having to wait to use it again.

Math time!

Okay, let's take, for ease of math, a 100 damage attack, that animates in 1 second, and has a 9 second recharge time*.

With no slotting (except for accuracy, let's say), you deal 10 DPS with this attack.


Slotting 1 even-level SO of Damage gives you 33% more damage. Thus, your attack now does 133 damage, and still recharges in 9 seconds. You're now doing 13.3 DPS.

Switch out that Damage SO for a Recharge. Your power now recharges in (9/(1=.33)) = 6.77 seconds (+1 second for the animation). Doing 100 Damage, you're now at 12.8 DPS. So, the Damage enhancement increases your DPS more than the recharge enhancement does.

Now, let's take a look at 3 Dam, 1 Recharge vs. 2 Dam, 2 Recharge.

196 Damage in 6.77 seconds + 1 second animation = 25.23 DPS

167 Damage in 5.39 seconds + 1 second animation = 26.13 DPS


So there is indeed a switching point here, because of the 'diminishing returns' on additional slotting. Adding a bit of both seems to do best in terms of DPS, so that might be a way that you can go, but this isn't taking into account your endurance concerns, either.



*None of the DPS calculations here take into account Arcana-time, which will skew things more heavily towards the slotting-for-damage side of thise, I believe.